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Visioning The Nation: Classical Images As Allegory During The Visioning The Nation: Classical Images As Allegory During The

French Revolution French Revolution

Kristopher Guy Reed University of Central Florida

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VISIONING THE NATION: CLASSICAL IMAGES AS ALLEGORY DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

by

KRISTOPHER G. REED BA Stetson University, 1998

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Department of History

in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida

Orlando, Florida

Fall Term 2007

Major Professor: Amelia Lyons

ABSTRACT

In the latter half of the Eighteenth Century, France experienced a seismic shift in

the nature of political culture. The king gave way to the nation at the center of political

life as the location of sovereignty transferred to the people. While the French

Revolution changed the structure of France’s government, it also changed the

allegorical representations of the nation. At the Revolution’s onset, the monarchy

embodied both the state and nation as equated ideas. During the Revolutionary

Decade and through the reign of Napoleon different governments experienced the need

to reorient these symbols away from the person of the king to the national community.

Following the king’s execution, the Committee government invented connections to the

ancient past in order to build legitimacy for their rule in addition to extricating the

monarchy’s symbols from political life. During the rule of Napoleon, he used classical

symbols to associate himself with Roman Emperors to embody the nation in his person.

Through an examination of the different types of classical symbols that each

government illustrates the different ways that attempted to symbolically document this

important shift in the location of sovereignty away from the body of the king to the

nation.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...................................................................................................iv CHAPTER ONE: VISUALIZING POWER DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 1 CHAPTER TWO: INVENTING THE NATION........................................................ 17 CHAPTER THREE: HERCULES, LIBERTY AND REPUBLICANS, 1793-1794.... 36 CHAPTER FOUR: NAPOLEON AND THE NEW ROME ...................................... 57 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION ........................................................................... 76 REFERENCES....................................................................................................... 81

iii

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen ................................................ 29 Figure 2: Louis XVI, King of the French........................................................................ 33 Figure 3: Seal of the Republic ...................................................................................... 41 Figure 4: The French People Overwhelming the Hydra of Federalism......................... 49 Figure 5: Le Peuple Mangeur de Rois.......................................................................... 51 Figure 6: Sketch by Dupree for Hercules Coin, 1795 ................................................... 54 Figure 7: Napoleon Saves France................................................................................ 67 Figure 8: Bust of Napoleon the Lawgiver ..................................................................... 70 Figure 9: Bust of Julius Caesar .................................................................................... 71 Figure 10: 5 Franc Coin 1804....................................................................................... 74

iv

CHAPTER ONE: VISUALIZING POWER DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Soldiers of my Old Guard: I bid you farewell. For twenty years I have constantly accompanied you on the road to honor and glory. In these latter times, as in the days of our prosperity, you have invariably been models of courage and fidelity.1

-Napoleon Bonaparte, Farewell to the Old Guard

In 1814, Jacques Lois David completed one of his many masterworks, Leonidas

at Thermopylae. Like many of David’s previous works, it explored contemporary virtues

in a classical setting. The work depicts the heroic stand of the 300 Spartans at

Thermopylae and the painting closely parallels the collapse of Napoleon’s once

enormous empire. A generation before, David unveiled the Oath of the Horatii, a

painting that presented Characters bound by oath, acting out of self-sacrifice, patriotism

and duty to the state rather than obligation to hierarchy.2 While many historians

consider David a political artist, his work does illustrates the ways that classical imagery

replaced various Old Regime symbols as allegorical representations of political virtues

in a national community. While these paintings attempt to frame contemporary events

within the context of the classical world, they also illustrate the growing belief that the

classical past could be a guidepost for France’s future.3 Between 1785 and 1815, the

symbolic construct of the French state shifted from allegories of the monarchy towards

symbols from antiquity associated with the nation. Understanding the ways that

1 Napoleon Bonaparte, Farewell to the Old Guard 2 Gillian Perry, ed. and Michael Rossington, ed. Femininity and Masculinity in

Eighteenth-century Art and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Pres, 1994, p. 8 3 David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as

We Know It, New York, Houghton-Miffon, 2007.

1

monarchy and various governments during the French Revolution employed allegorical

representations of the nation is vital to understanding not only the French Revolution,

but also the process of shifting sovereignty from the monarchy to the nation.

While these paintings exemplify a particular political agenda, they do reflect the

wider interest in antiquity that existed during the Eighteenth Century. Writers such as

Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu touched on various ancient references in their

work and the works of these writers heavily influenced the Revolutionary generation,

often serving as a basis for their actions. The writings of Rousseau were of particular

importance in this case because so many Revolutionaries read his work. His

endorsement of Greece and Rome as the highest points of Western Civilization, led

many to attempt the creation of modern descendant of these civilizations that obtained

legitimacy from its connection to this ancient past.4 Nearly all Eighteenth Century

educations involved a close examination of a large number of Classical texts, complete

with Latin and Greek language training.5 In many ways, antiquity seemed like a natural

choice for many Revolutionaries to obtain allegorical representations because much of

antiquity’s symbolic construct was easily recognizable to a wide range of people within

France.6 Furthermore, antiquity was the birthplace of the West’s republican tradition

and attempting to build mythological connections to this period represented an attempt

4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences” in J. J.

Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, New York, David Campbell Publishers, 1992, pp. 4-5.

5 Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1937, pp. 44-45.

6 Ibid.

2

to build legitimacy. Coupled with the political agendas of the Revolutionaries, allegories

from the past provided an excellent foundation on which to build a New France.

Towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, the growth of scientific knowledge

and the French Enlightenment began to erode traditional explanations and justifications

for existing political and social institutions. Before the Eighteenth Century, the Bourbon

Monarchy, Catholic Church, Nobility and even Parlements enjoyed a dominant voice in

this discussion about public life. Beginning in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century

though, growing public participation in discourse about public life led to growing

demands for actual participation in political life.7 Within this emerging environment, the

traditional justifications of social rank and hierarchy did not quell these new demands for

involvement and coupled with France’s external pressures, the monarchy to called the

first Estates General in nearly two centuries. This attempt at solving France’s national

problems through reform quickly provided the Third Estate delegates an opportunity to

raise questions about national representation that characterized much of the French

Revolution. Eventually, the French monarchy, an instrumental part of the modern

nation state’s development and the creation of national sentiment, became an enemy of

the Revolution and a larger conflict ensued between the monarchy and Revolution’s

visions of who spoke for the nation.8

7 Jurgen Habermas, Thomas Burger (trans.), The Structural Transformation of

the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1991, pp. 14-27

8 David Bell, The Cult of the Nation in Eighteenth Century France: Inventing nationalism 1680-1800, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2003. In this work, Bell discusses the monarchy’s instrumental role in developing national sentiment in France during the Eighteenth Century.

3

The first section of Chapter Two examines the ways that the Bourbon Monarchy

embarked on a program of political centralization that culminated with the West’s first

absolutist state. Religious conflict, increased administrative capability, noble infighting

and capable kings all contributed to the success of the French monarchy occupying a

central place in national political life. As the monarchy imposed higher levels of direct

rule by Royal administrators throughout France, the monarchy increasingly represented

the nation in the person of the king. This rise in national sentiment, embodied in the

monarch provided the first initial allegory of the nation because the king came to

symbolize France and the two became intertwined metaphors.9 During the Seven

Years War, the monarchy equated its own success in the war with the success of

France. This important turn marked the end of purely dynastic interests and the

beginning of the national.10 Within this important crucible of the late Eighteenth

Century, the French monarchy produced propaganda further associating the king with

the nation.11 As France moved towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, the

Enlightenment, fiscal debt crisis, and political problems all conspired to erode the

monarchy’s ability to rule. A desperate Louis XVI called the Estates General and the

French Revolution began.

The second section of Chapter Two examines the questions that arose during

the French Revolution’s initial stage about which groups ought to speak for the nation

and where legitimacy originated. Conflict and tension quickly rose about the king’s

position in the new political arrangement, the rights of elected legislative assemblies

9 Ibid, 22-50. 10 Ibid., 78-107. 11 Ibid.

4

and the privileges of the nobility.12 The battle over who would speak for the nation

politically quickly led to conflicts about which visual allegories would represent the

nation in the future.13 As the National Assembly drafted legislation defining the rights of

French Citizens, abolishing feudalism and writing a constitution, they also implemented

new symbols like the goddess Liberty that reflected the liberal values of the early

Revolution. The conflict over the nature of these allegorical symbols that represented

the nation led to an uneasy accommodation between the hierarchical values of the

monarchy and the egalitarian values of the National Assembly.14 In the midst of this

tension, the king attempted to flee the country in order to return in a more advantageous

position and renegotiate the terms of the Revolution. This crisis led to the rise of

radicals that effectively made the king an enemy of the nation.15

The Third Chapter examines the events that followed the king’s flight and

execution. During this period, the French Revolution quickly and suddenly transformed

from a liberal attempt to reform the political system into an effort to remake society from

the ground up. While the government declared itself a republic six months before, the

12 Emmanuel Joseph Siéyes, “What is the Third Estate?” This famous pamphlet

that appeared in early 1789 positions the nobility and clergy not as members of the nation, but enemies of the nation: “The noble order is not less estranged from the generality of us by its civil and political prerogatives…The Third Estate embraces then all that which belongs to the nation; and all that which is not the Third Estate, cannot be regarded as being of the nation.”

13 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982.

14 David Jordan, The King’s Trial: Louis XVI vs. the French Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979. pp. 11-12.

15 Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 90-92. In this work, Tackett discusses the ways that French society radicalized during the Revolution, particularly following the king’s flight to Varennes.

5

king’s execution caused outrage throughout parts of France and much of Europe. The

new government, headed by the Committee for Public Safety, held emergency powers

and faced a myriad of challenges both within France and with other European states.

The Committee also possessed a number of unique opportunities as well as the will to

remake French political culture.16 Lynn Hut discusses this situation in her work, Politics,

Culture and Class in the French Revolution:

They (the Bourbon monarchy) had also succeeded in making power virtually coterminous with the symbolic apparatus of monarchy, especially the body of the king. To regain their own political responsibilities as citizens, to take power for themselves, the French had to eliminate all of those symbolic connections to the monarchy and the king’s body. Eventually this took the form of putting the king on trial and executing him in public… Thus the revolutionaries’ passion for the allegorical, the theatrical, and the stylized was not simply a bizarre aberration, but rather an essential element in their effort to mold free men. In the long run, moreover, symbolic forms lent the revolutionary experience psycho-political continuity. Its symbols and rituals gave the Revolution a longue duree, they were the tangible reminders of the secular tradition of republicanism and revolution.17

In addition to their program to crush royalist revolts in the southern and western parts of

the country, the Committee also began to remake the allegorical symbols of the nation,

replacing both Liberty and the monarchy with the powerful Hercules. This point is critical

in understanding republicanism during the Revolution because of the government’s

need to create meaning and continuity that would underlie their political platform as well

16 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and

Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso, 1983, p. 11. Here, Anderson brings out a fundamental paradox of nationalism that French republicans found themselves faced with during the First Republic: “nation-states are widely conceded to be ‘new’ and ‘historical,’ the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past.”

17 Hunt, Politics Culture and Class, p. 57.

6

as create historical legitimacy for their new agenda. The allegory of Hercules presented

many opportunities for the new government because he projected images of both

strength and unity. When the crises of 1793-1794 eventually passed and the

Committee government fell, the images of Hercules began to change from a vigorous,

active hero carrying the club of popular violence into a Roman patrician, standing calmly

with Liberty. While the Committee failed to institute Hercules permanently, it did remake

much of France’s political culture because of its attempt to place the nation at the

allegorical center of political life and this aspect of their program formed the basis for

future government’s legitimacy.

Chapter Four examines the ways that subsequent governments attempted to

accommodate and symbolically represent the nation at the center of political life. In the

period following the arrest and execution of Robespierre and his allies in the summer of

1794, the Directory governed France for five years with mixed results, leading to the

Coup d'état of Napoleon Bonaparte. Beginning with his first government and

constitution, the Consulate, Bonaparte regularly imported symbols, images and

vocabulary from Rome’s republic in an effort to both solidify his Revolutionary

credentials as well as secure his own political legitimacy.18 Where previous

governments during the Revolution struggled to move the symbolic representations of

the state away from abstract virtues like freedom, strength and equality, Bonaparte

created allegorical images that positioned himself as the new Caesar, rescuing France

from the previous decade of instability and civil war. Positioning himself as a new

18 Robert Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State

University Press, 1982.

7

Caesar had many advantages for the young general: he would allay fears of further

violence and civil wars and at the same time, send a signal to the French population

that he would usher in a glorious era of peace and prosperity, similar to his ancient

Roman counterpart.19 For these reasons and others, Bonaparte’s reign saw the

symbols of modern France take shape and more importantly, the ways that Bonaparte

used classical, particularly Roman symbols to maintain and enhance his personal

standing as representative of the nation is a principle tactic that dictators employ

through the modern era.

While the French Revolution caused tremendous turmoil in the closing decade of

the Eighteenth Century, the Revolution’s legacy inspires perhaps as much conflict in the

more than two centuries since. General disagreement still exists among historians

about the Revolution’s cause and their effects on subsequent European history. Alexis

de Tocqueville viewed the Revolution as a natural progression of state centralization

begun under the monarchy and completed during the Revolution.20 Marx viewed the

Revolution as a class conflict event that created national political structures that

mimicked economic realities that already existed. In modern history classrooms, the

French Revolution often marks the division between the Early Modern and Modern

periods of Western History. In each instance though, the Revolution’s meaning remains

a subject of frequent dispute because scholars disagree about the positive or negative

implication of Revolutionary events. In many ways, an approach to examining the

Revolution says as much about the politics of the scholar as it does about the nature of

19 Ibid. 20 Alexis de Tocqueville, Alan Kahan (trans.), The Old Regime and the French

Revolution, New York, Doubleday, 1955.

8

their scholarship. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, scholars began to

examine the different ways that French Revolutionaries changed political culture in the

West and revived many classical images to do so.

Many of these early scholars frequently framed the Revolution within a Classical

context. The writings of F. A. Aulard at the turn of the Twentieth Century and Harold

Parker in the middle part of the Century, two historians often forgotten, have proved

useful to my analysis because they particularly stand out because of the different ways

they examine the Classical world’s influence on the French Revolution. While Aulard’s

primary work was in the translation of Revolutionary documents, he did contribute

dramatically to the field with his studies on the underlying political reasons underlying

the Revolution itself.21 Most importantly though, Aulard was among the first historians

of the Revolution to connect antiquity with the ideas and actions of the French

Revolutionaries. Through his work cataloguing the proceedings of the Estates General

and National Convention, he noted repeated instances of Revolutionaries referencing

republican rhetoric from the Ancient world.22 Aulard went on to argue that many of the

Revolutionary generation must have incorporated this symbolism and political rhetoric

as a means to separate themselves from other politicians during this tumultuous decade

where differences in political stances often meant the difference between life and death.

Harold Parker on the other hand did not simply suggest that the French

Revolution incorporated some aspects of the classical world; he argued that this

21 F. A. Aulard, Bernard Miall (trans.) The French Revolution: A Political History,

1789-1804, New York, Scribner, 1910. A good translation of Aulard’s seminal text that discusses the Revolutionary process, the actors and their motivations.

22 Ibid. Or, for another example of Aulard’s work, see F. A. Aulard, Christianity and the French Revolution

9

connection to the classical world was central to the Revolution itself. In Parker’s book,

The Cult of Antiquity in the French Revolution, he describes an almost religious belief in

the virtues of the classical past that many of the radical Revolutionaries shared. In this

work, Parker develops the argument that classical themes, symbols and rhetoric

peppered the Revolutionary experience because of three factors, education, the

Enlightenment and the need to develop a political ideology that did not revolve around

the monarchy.23 An aspect of Parker’s work that raises some important questions lies

in his work on republican pamphlets. During the early stages of the Revolution,

monarchists wrote most of the pamphlets about republicanism (or at least, the most of

this group survive in the sources) and they argued that France was far too large a

country for a republic.24 Instead of using the ancient past a model for France’s future,

these pamphleteers used the Classical world as a warning about how republicanism

can destroy a society due to its instability. Furthermore, the pamphlets he uses as

examples of pro-republican rhetoric draw a definite parallel to the Classical world

because they discuss the greatness of the ancients and how if France created a

republic, it would exceed the ancient’s accomplishments many times over.

In the more recent past, many Marxist historians ignore developments in political

culture especially symbolic representations of the nation and their reluctance to discuss

23 Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolution, pp. 55-57. 24 Parker’s book includes an almost endless stream of pamphlets from the

Revolutionary era. Often he includes full texts and translations of pamphlets, both pro and anti-Revolution. Perhaps most importantly, Parker illustrates, long before Darnton that a literate public hungrily consumed these pamphlets and the need to convince this reading public was a central aspect of the revolutionary process. See also, Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1985.

10

political culture lies in their complete focus on class conflict as the engine of historical

change. To the Marxists, the bourgeoisies’ imperatives to create a state that promoted

a capitalist rather than feudal mode of production and this economic factor trumps all

other historical consideration. Contestation over political symbols following the

monarchy represents only a small footnote in this larger process of political

development.25 These early Marxist historians examined the historical processes at

work in the large picture of the Revolution, how the bourgeoisies formed connections

with the sans-culottes because it needed to in order to defeat the monarchy and nobility

in the central conflict of the Revolution.26 All of the Revolution’s events, the Declaration

of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the execution of Louis XVI, Enragés, radical

newspapers, international war and conflict, even the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte all fit

into the frame of class and economic relations. Put simply, within the Marxist context,

class was the central organizing principle of the Revolution because the outcome

benefited the bourgeoisies class, it was ultimately their revolution, the feudal mode of

production and the state architecture that reflected it collapsed in the face of modern

capitalism.

25 Albert Soboul and Georges Lefebvre are two noted historians that formulated

the Marxist, class analysis of the French Revolution that much of the subsequent work either supported or reacted to. See, Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005 (reprint). The classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution was originally published before World War II. See also, Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1977.

26 Albert Soboul, Allan Forrest and Colin Jones (trans.), The French Revolution, 1787-1799: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon, New York, Random House, 1977.

11

George Rudé’s work, The Crowd in the French Revolution examines the role that

popular action played in the Revolutionary process. Rudé ultimately concludes that this

popular action was the defining feature of the French Revolution from its onset through

1795 and that this popular intervention shaped the Revolution’s course.27 He examines

the different groups that participated in politics, police records and psychological

tensions between different classes. Rude ultimately argues that the Revolution was

successful because the sans-culottes were able to assimilate the liberal ideas of their

leaders28. The true value in Rudé’s work though lies in the comparisons he draws

between popular involvement during the French Revolution and other mass movements

throughout Western history. From Britain to Germany, Rudé argues that the idea of

popular participation begun during the French Revolution transformed from a French

novelty into a cornerstone of Western radical politics. While Rudé believes that class

was an important component in this transformation, he also begins to examine culture,

ideas and individual motivation as key components in understanding the Revolutionary

process between 1789 and 1795.

Beginning in the 1960’s though, Scholarship of the French Revolution began to

move away from the Marxists as a new generation of historians examined other issues

such as existing institutions, culture and the role of political discourse in the

revolutionary process.29 Historians like Furet and Cobbin began to critique the work of

27 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, New York, Oxford

University Press, 1967, pp. 8-9. 28 Ibid., 232. 29 Francois Furet, Elborg Forster (trans), Interpreting the French Revolution,

Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1981. In this work, Furet issues more of a historiography than history, examining the different interpretations of the

12

Marxist historians arguing that something as complex and cataclysmic as the French

Revolution cannot be explained in terms of a mere conflict between modalities of

production, but rather it is a product of a specific set of social, political, economic and

historical circumstances.30 These revisionists do not view the French Revolution as an

inevitable historical event; rather they see the Revolution as a process of consolidation,

of bringing together disparate economic, geographic and political groups and forming a

more unified society. Viewed through this lens, the French Revolution was more about

a homogenization brought on by increased urbanism and literacy, all of which ran

aground the existing political structures.

Lynn Hunt took many important aspects of these revisionist historians and

focused on national symbols and the important role they played in the development of

modern political culture. In Hunt’s interpretation, national symbols provide a central

focus that unifies society around a single center and the French Revolution essentially

shifted this center from the monarchy to the nation.31 In her work, Politics, Culture and

Class, Hunt lays out this argument about the effects of changing the central aspect of

political culture.32 She ultimately concludes that the execution of the king was an

important moment because it marked the break point in the transition between the

monarchy-centered Old Regime and the nation centered republic. In her analysis, Hunt

French Revolution and postulating the various problems with the Marxist interpretation. Furet remains important in the historiography not because he was the first revisionist historian to challenge Marxist orthodoxy, but rather because of his skill at effectively summarizing the revisionist position within the historiography.

30 Alfred Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1999 (reprint), pp. 8-10.

31 Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, pp. 52-57. 32 Ibid.

13

also examines the various undercurrents of Revolutionary culture and argues that the

Revolutionaries changed culture and that this change dramatically affected the nation’s

political life. This interpretation stands in contrast to much of the previous scholarship

because it posits culture as a preeminent factor in the Revolutionary process rather than

politics or economics. Hunt’s work remains influential among historians that examine

the ways that French cultural changes that emerged during the Enlightenment

institutionalized during the French Revolution.

Cultural/Gender historians like Joan Landes, recently took on issues of political

symbols and their role in the French Revolution head on, examining the particular ways

that the Revolution both included and excluded women from political life. Landes

concludes that the masculine language of the Enlightenment translated into a

masculine, patriarchal state that ultimately relegated women to a domestic position.33

The development of a rational, public sphere necessitated the exclusion of women

because of the Enlightenment’s gender sensibilities of complimentary virtues.34 Unlike

previous interpretive frameworks, gender historians analyze the ways that the

Revolution used both masculine and feminine symbols in positive and negative ways

because these national symbols often reinforced popular conceptions of natural gender

roles for men and women. A picture of Hercules taking action, or the image of an eagle

denoted male dominance of the political realm because both of these symbols reflect

33 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French

Revolution, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1988. In this work, Landes argues that the Enlightenment created a cultural environment where masculine language replaced feminine relationships. See also, Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth Century France, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001.

34 Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, pp. 170-172.

14

masculine qualities. Conversely, symbols of the goddess liberty, passively standing by

while others perform the action, or a liberty tree fertilizing the ground denotes feminine

qualities of distance and inactivity.35 Taken together, the new symbols did not merely

present a different way of interpreting the nation, but also the place of gender within this

new nation and the ways that decisions about gender unfolded during this unique period

had a tremendous effect on the social/gender order that would follow the Revolution.

As the Revolution moved from a liberal attempt at restructuring the state into a

full-blown restructuring of society to a military dictatorship, the ways that various

governments employed allegorical representations from the ancient world was an

integral part of the platform of each incarnation. While textual and even musical

sources exist that governments used to incite nationalist sentiment, images were (and

very much still do) represent the principle ways that governments allegorically represent

the people they govern. While many historians examine the historical context, political

outcomes and cultural changes the Revolution brought about, they often ignore the

types of symbols each government employed and how each of these symbols signaled

a conflict over how to represent the nation. The following chapters will examine the

different ways that various symbols reflected each government’s values regarding the

nation. In the early Revolution, following the king’s execution and through Bonaparte’s

reign, shifts took place the called into question the fundamentals of political society. At

the Revolution’s conclusion, France was irrevocably changed, despite the efforts of

Europe’s victorious powers to reinstall the Bourbons, the nation remained at the center

of political life until the current day. The Revolution and its construction of nationalism

35 Landes, Visualizing the Nation p. 74.

15

fundamentally altered France, transforming it from a society embodied by an absolute

monarch into a state embodied in every member of society.

16

CHAPTER TWO: INVENTING THE NATION These principles, universally acknowledged by the entire kingdom, are that the King alone must possess the sovereign power in his kingdom; that He is answerable only to God in the exercise of his power; that the tie which binds the King to the Nation is by nature indissoluble; that the interests and reciprocal obligations between the King and his subjects serve only to reassure that union.1

-Lamoignon, "The Principles of the French Monarchy"

Beginning in the Seventeenth Century, Louis XIV actively began to centralize the

French state. During his rule, he established direct rule over much of France, built a

large central bureaucracy, transferred power to royal ministers and built the palace of

Versailles. While historians debate the efficacy of this program and many of Louis XIV’s

efforts met with mixed results at best, the precedent of political centralization had

begun. Gradually, the monarchy transformed from an institution of nobility, dependant

on private holdings and personal fealty into an institution that sat at the center of a

kingdom with several transnational holdings and a vast overseas empire. A century

after Louis XIV took the throne, the monarchy, nobility and Parelements operated within

a system of privileges, rights and obligations that governed much of this central state.

In the middle of the Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment ideas spread throughout Europe

and the traditions of monarchical rule began to erode. During this period between 1750

and 1789, this decline in the monarchy’s legitimacy coupled with the rise of

Enlightenment values shifted the center of political sovereignty from the king to the

1 Lamoignon, "The Principles of the French Monarchy" (1787), in, Lynn Hunt,

Jack Censor, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, State College, Pennsylvania State University, 1998, CD-ROM

17

nation and a large number of visual representations of the state illustrate this change

from monarchy to representative government.

The question of when the nation emerged as an entity that moved to the center

of the political system emerged in the last fifty years within the scholarship of

nationalism. This debate began to attack many preconceptions about the nation as an

ancient institution, revealing its modern origins, commensurate with the rise of a

centralized state and language. In his highly influential work, Peasants into Frenchman,

Eugen Weber argues that this process began in the middle of the Nineteenth Century

and culminated on the eve of World War One.2 In Weber’s mind, the cultural

Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, the tumultuous events of the French

Revolution and rising living standards were, in fact, strictly an urban phenomenon and

that despite these wide-ranging changes, life in France’s rural areas changed little from

the previous centuries. To Weber, the notion of France is not a natural evolution, but

rather a social construction of the Nineteenth Century. Benedict Anderson on the other

hand, believes that this invention of the nation occurred much earlier, perhaps in the

mid-Eighteenth Century and was the result of a widespread expansion of the published

word that began at the same time. Driven by capitalist imperatives, printers began

producing material in vernacular languages because of the vastly larger population that

would be target through such business practices.3 While Weber believes that the idea

of a national community did not appear until the late Nineteenth Century, Anderson

2 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France,

1870-1914, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1976, pp. 5-7. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso Press, 2006 (reprint), pp. 37-39.

18

argues that the national community, particularly in France developed in the middle

Eighteenth Century because of the emphasis placed on national language and culture.

Eric Hobsbawm falls chronologically in the middle of these two scholars, arguing that

the nation was essentially a creation of the period that immediately followed the Age of

Revolutions. Like Weber, Hobsbawm believes that the nation largely emerged as a

product of state power as a new means of gaining popular legitimacy and the more that

European states democratized, the more important the nation became as a political

entity.4

David Bell has recently emerged in this discussion about the origins of

nationalism, arguing that it happened far earlier in France than the previous literature

suggests. In his work, The Cult of the Nation, Bell argues that the myths surrounding

the patrie were a unique creation of Eighteenth Century France and that nationalism

grew out of this peculiar sense of country.5 Bell also examines the role that external

circumstances played in the process, most notably the Century’s protracted military

conflicts. The many wars that France participated in necessitated a more centralized

government and an several programs intended to build morale among the population

laid a cornerstone of France’s national community.6 Taken together, these historians

argue that the nation’s emergence coincided with the growth in state power and the

emergence of centralized governments. Each scholar attempts to point out the ways

4 Eric. J. Hobsbawm, “The Invention of Tradition,” in, Eric J. Hobsbawm,

Terrence Ranger (ed.), The Invention of Tradition, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 1-2.

5 David Bell, The Cult of the Nation on France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 6-7.

6 Ibid.

19

that the nation was human choice, not natural evolution and examining this shift from

kingdom to nation in France illustrates how the new sovereignty of the population

replaced that of the king.

In the final century of the Early Modern period, French monarchs engaged in this

program to centralize state power around the king and this effort began the gradual

process of the development of national sentiment.7 Throughout history, monarchs have

relied on particular groups of political symbols that reinforce the status of the king to

maintain their aura of legitimacy and the Bourbon monarchs of France were certainly no

different.8 During this approximately one hundred year period though, the nature and

perception of these symbols would change due to a concerted effort on the part of the

various interests within the monarchy itself to build a national consensus and

justification for the king’s policies.9 The writings of Jacques Bossuet illustrate this

transition because he provided a powerful intellectual underpinning for absolutism. His

argument for the patriarchal, familial state placed the king squarely at the head of the

7 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France, Cambridge, England,

Cambridge University Press, 1995. Collins examines a wide range of issues in the is book, but his central contention, that France was not an absolute monarchy as previously imagined, but rather a collection of rules, institutions and financial systems that served that benefited the clique of elite. He further argues that the growth in royal power was more the result of expedient financial considerations rather than the belief of creating a divine right kingship.

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., pp. 173-174. Here, Collins makes the argument that Louis XIV “did more

than any other king to undermine the sacral nature of the French Kingship” than any other French monarch. Collins continues, ultimately making the argument that the monarch’s claims to absolute authority as a tactic to solve contemporary problems created a set of long term problems that would eventually overwhelm the monarchy itself.

20

government, as a father would be head of a household.10 In Bossuet’s mind, the king

was the head and representative of society, not a member of it. The visual imagery of

French monarchs in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century reflect this idea because

they show the monarchs awash in symbols of power and divinity. This system of

representation always showed the king’s entire body because it was the source of

sovereignty.11 Portraits rarely included only the king’s face and this illustration of the

king’s body drew connections to his position as the nation’s paternal figure. This

intellectual theory of absolutism and visual representation of the monarchy began the

process of moving the king to the center of national political life.

At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, the growing literacy of France’s

urban classes combined with the Enlightenment to create a set of challenges to the

monarchy itself, often from within the existing political structure.12 This widespread

literacy was an important concurrent development to the growth of national sentiment

because it intensified the debates about the relationship between the monarchy and

society. Various factions within political society that possessed privileges such as the

Parlements or various nobles often questioned the king’s actions and often times openly

defied them with elaborate explanations to a newly literate public.13 While the

10 Jacques Bossuet, Patrick Riley (trans.), Politics Drawn from the Very Holy

Words of Scripture, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 62-63. 11 Ernst Kantorowitz, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton, Princeton University

Press, 1957, p. 8-10. 12 Marina Valensise, “The French Constitution in Prerevolutionary Debate,” The

Journal of Modern History, Vol. 60, 1988, Supplement: Rethinking French Politics in 1788, p. s36

13 Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeoisie Society, Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, trans, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1989

21

monarchy on the one hand attempted to consolidate power through the effective use of

royal administrators, the French political structure cracked along different lines because

of increased public discourse in political life.

In this milieu, the nature of the king’s power began to change because of the

changes in the society that he ruled. Before and during much of the Eighteenth

Century, the monarchy consolidated its position at the center of government rule and

politics focused on the king’s body. In this system, all political attention turned towards

the monarch and all those subject to his rule existed as members of the kingdom.14

Marina Valensise describes this idea of the monarchy in her article “The French

Constitution in Prerevolutionary Debate:”

The sovereign authority of the monarch: he was to have full, entire and independent power. Of divine origin, this authority made the king the supreme legislator of the kingdom, excluding, by means of metaphysical representation of power, any legislative vocation on the part of the nation. As both law-giver and law-wielder the king of France had no superior authority but God. The king’s actions were inscribed in an ancient conception of justice considered as the source of law, of which he was not merely the repository but also the interpreter.15

This description clearly illustrates a conception of the monarchy as an institution in the

Aristotelian chain of being between man and God. At some point in the Eighteenth

Century, this shifted and political life reoriented away from the hierarchical model of

14 Kantorowitz, The King’s Two Bodies. In this section, Kantorowitz elucidates

the basic theory of absolute monarchies, that the king had a physical body that occupied the throne, but also, he possessed a spiritual body that connected the country to God in a great chain of being.

15 Valensise, p. s36. In this passage, Valensise discusses an ongoing debate about the concept of a constitution in France before the Revolution. She ultimately settles on this excellent description of absolutism.

22

kingship towards a more horizontal model of politics.16 As political culture moved away

from a vertical model and the public enjoyed a greater role in political life, the king’s

centrality to the political began to diminish as well. In the previous model, all of

France’s political life centered on the king, in the developing new model, the people sat

at the center of political life and determining where the people lived on a map

established a geographic area that the government should rule, a key component of

national sentiment with the king as supreme national representative.17

The Seven Years War represents an example of this growing conflagration

between the monarchy and the nation because of the clear connections between the

king and national interest. The war created a series of crises that afforded the

monarchy an opportunity to exert dominance over national affairs because of the

financial needs associated with the war’s increased costs.18 While the Seven Years

War remains an important event in Western History because of its realignment of

Europe’s political and economic power relationships, it also marked an important shift in

the ways that the French monarchy associated itself with the national body politic.19 As

the war progressed and French prospects for a favorable outcome to the fighting

16 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters, A Cultural History of the French

Enlightenment, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994. In this work, Goodman examines the ways that the Enlightenment changed the nature of political life because it created a public intellectual community that discussed the political issues of the day.

17 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 18 Charles Tilly, “State and Counterrevolution in France,” in Ferenc Feher, ed.,

The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, p. 51

19 Ibid., Tilly remarks “War made the greatest difference because it expanded not only armies and navies but also fiscal administration, supply services, support for veterans, and national debt; those expansions, in turn inflated the state’s demands on its subject populations.”

23

diminished, the level of propaganda increased dramatically in an effort to gain public

support for the faltering war effort.20 The increasing financial and political stake of the

French Monarchy in the war necessitated new strategies to raise public support for the

war and these strategies often included broad and direct appeals to popular opinion to

shore up the war effort.21 Both written and visual propaganda encouraged contributions

to the war, both financial and physical and often times drew lines between the French

and English, emphasizing the civilized nature of the former and the brutishness of the

latter.22 Following the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the tone of this material retreated

significantly, regarding England as a “rival nation” rather than a sate comprised of

barbarians.23 The importance of this shift lies in the ways that the monarchy began to

speak for France and in many ways became the embodiment of the French people,

drawing connections between the monarchy’s and France’s fortunes.

While the historiography of the French Revolution discusses the ways that the

Revolution reoriented politics away from the monarchy towards the nation in order to

bolster their own legitimacy as representatives of the nation, it often ignores the ways

that the French monarchy engaged in the same activities before the Revolution.

20 Bell, Cult of the Nation. In this section, Bell discusses the ways that Royal

propagandists drew lines between the French and English, who were framed as “barbarians.” He argues here that during this war, appeals were made on a patriotic level and they frequently equated the king’s interest to the nation’s interest.

21 Theda Skocpol and Meyer Kestnbum, “Mars Unshackled: The French Revolution in World-Historical Perspective,” in The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity, pp. 17-18.

22 Bell, Cult of the Nation, 78-84. Bell notes here quite effectively that the differences were political and national rather than religious, despite the religious differences. In other words, the monarchy was more closely associated with the nation on its own terms rather than the divine terms of the Church. By comparison, in England much of the war propaganda contains anti-Catholic diatribes against France.

23 Ibid.

24

Through referencing a supposed long line of French Kings that ruled since the time of

Clovis in an unbroken line, the monarchy attempted to invent myths about its own past

as a means of creating legitimacy in the present. On each occasion of a public display

of royal power, a wide array of symbols, rituals and language asserted the ancient

nature of the monarchy.24 It was only because of the recent centralization of power that

the monarchy more effectively ruled France, but these ancient assertions illustrate an

important way the monarchy itself changed because the engagement of the public for

support during the war exemplifies the subtle ways that sovereignty was shifting

towards the nation.25 In David Bell’s work, The Cult of the Nation, he discusses the

ways that the tumult of the wars led every king to be a patriot. He cites an anonymous

speech given to the Academy of Lyon in 1762: “The King and the patrie are two objects

that are united, incorporated together… in the hearts of the nation, as in the national

constitution.”26 One of Bell’s key assertions in this work has to do with the ways that

French nationalism, or that is to say, the sense of a national community in France with

connections between members of the national body was not a product of the Revolution

as much of the historiography suggests. Bell argues that it was under the absolute

monarchs of the Old Regime that this process began and that associating the king with

the state and the citizenry is where nationalism’s identity lies. The speaker asserts here

that a mythical-historical connection exists between the king, the nation and the national

constitution and that this connection is somehow rooted in a long arc of history, as

thought it were part of a natural evolution of political affairs rather than a consequence

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., p. 63.

25

of contemporary events. What this passage illustrates though is the emergence of the

idea of France as a nation and the king as its representative.

Towards the End of the Eighteenth Century, the foundations of the French

monarchy that began to crack decades earlier started to collapse. Financial difficulties,

a string of military defeats, and the Enlightenment’s constant literary attack on the

institutions of the monarchy and nobility created a situation were questions constantly

arose questioning the king’s ability to lead. The economic crisis of the latter 1780’s

proved to be an obstacle the monarchy was unable to overcome and this crisis

prompted Louis XVI to call for an Estates General to deal with France’s mounting

problems. The Estates General quickly transformed from a body to build a national

consensus on how to address France’s political and financial problems into a legislative

assembly that claimed authority from the nation to speak on behalf of France. In this

important moment, the monarchy still symbolically sat at the center of the French state,

but it now faced competition from the nation for control of that state. This early phase of

the French Revolution attempted to create national, representative institutions that

would give voice to this new source of political sovereignty under the monarchy. Before

the upheaval, civil strife and foreign wars that mark much of the Revolutionary decade,

the French Revolution was a movement to reform the government in an attempt to

modernize its institutions.27 The Declaration of the Rights of Man, abolition of privilege

and the creation of the National Assembly all represent reformist attempts rather than a

27 William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, New York, Oxford

University Press, 1989.

26

complete recasting of society.28 While considerable friction existed between the

Revolutionary government and the monarchy, many members of the National Assembly

wanted to maintain the monarchy as an institution because of their desire to maintain a

link with France’s cultural traditions as well as maintain a practical sense of political

stability.29 A symbolic conflict also existed within this milieu because the symbols of

monarchy required an emphasis on the king as the source of sovereignty while the new

government attempted to constitute symbols that positioned the population as the

source of legitimate government and this conflict lies at the heart of these dramatically

different visions of the state’s symbolic structure.30 In this struggle, symbols

representing legitimacy from above and legitimacy from below vied for centrality in the

new discourse of politics.

During this initial conflict, the different representations of the nation, the

monarchy and power all changed rapidly as the National Assembly attempted to

legitimize its actions. This new arrangement immediately created conflict between those

clamoring for reform and those insisting on the maintenance of privilege. David Jordon

describes the situation in his acclaimed book, The King’s Trial:

The king was a problem for the Revolution from the beginning… For 175 years, the kings of France had ruled under the legal maxim ‘the king can do no wrong’; they had said, as Louis XVI said when a subject challenged the legality of his actions, ‘it is legal because I wish it.” This view of government ad society could not live in harmony with its antithesis, a representative national assembly elected by manhood suffrage.”31

28 Ibid. 29 Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Harvard University Press, 2003. pp. 108-109. 30 Bell, The Cult of the Nation, pp. 154-155. 31 David Jordan, The King’s Trial: Louis XVI vs. The French Revolution,

Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979, p. 11.

27

Here, Jordan lays out one of the Revolution’s most pressing issues, how to reconcile

the monarchy with the values of Revolutionaries, two seemingly opposite conceptions of

power coexisting under the new government. While the monarchy embraced the nation

as a means of gaining political support, the king was certainly hesitant about allowing

the nation a prominent voice in political life. Symbolically this also presented a problem

because it necessitated a juxtaposition of symbols that represented the nation along

side symbols that represented the monarchy.

When the Estates General gave way to the formation of the National Assembly,

visual images of the nation changed a well and this shift moved France from a monarch

centered representation of the nation towards a public centered representation. One of

the National Assembly’s first actions was to pass the “Declaration of the Rights of Man

and Citizen” in the summer of 1789.32 While this action symbolically guaranteed the

rights of all Frenchmen, it also firmly established the rule of law as the guiding principle

of the new government. Through the codification of rights, the National Assembly

essentially placed members of the nation above all other political consideration. Louis

XVI’s refusal to sign the Declaration illustrates the challenge it posted because of its

explicit rejection of the monarchy as the source of political authority.33 Pictures of the

Declaration needed to contain a symbolic architecture that demonstrated this shift in

sovereignty from the king to the nation. The following image of the Declaration shows

32 Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 112-115. 33 Ibid.

28

the different ways that the National Assembly attempted to gain legitimacy for

themselves.

Figure 1: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen34

Several aspects of this representation demonstrate this attempt to shift the symbols of

state power towards the nation. First, the text of the Declaration appears on two tablets

similar to the Ten Commandments, emphasizing the need for a supreme law that would

bind the nation together. The use of a two-tablet motif also helped build a historical

34 Lynn Hunt and Jack Censor, “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

29

connection that the National Assembly lacked, allowing it to claim a reconstitution of

ancient traditions rather than the invention of new ones. Secondly, the placement of the

fasces between the two tablets also lends it authority because of the fasces’ ancient

roots as a symbol of rightful, legitimate authority. While the National Assembly agreed

that the king would still be instrumental in the construction of a new political society built

around representative institutions, the placement of the fasces on the Declaration of the

Rights of Man places the rule of law above all existing institutions. Thirdly, the

placement of a Phrygian cap above the fasces associates the Declaration and the

power of law with the Revolution itself. In the Roman world, freed slaves donned the

Phrygian cap as a way of identifying their status and during the French Revolution,

many revolutionaries used the cap as a means of identifying those sympathetic to the

Revolution.35 The cap quickly came to symbolize the Revolution itself and its

positioning above the fasces highlights the belief among the National Assembly

members that they now represented the nation and that ultimate sovereignty rested with

the nation as well. Taken together, the symbolic structure of this incarnation of the

Declaration illustrate the different ways that the newly formed National Assembly

attempted to visually represent this shift to the nation at the center of politics.

In the wake of the August Decrees and the Declaration of the Rights of man, the

National Assembly went about consolidating power despite strong resistance from the

king. Before the National Assembly began their program of reforms, the Louis XVI

issued his own vision for the Revolution, called the séance royal, Louis insisted on the

35 J. David Harden, “Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees,” Past and Present, No. 146,

Feb., 1995, pp. 66-102.

30

maintenance of property and privilege as the Revolution moved forward.36 The failure

of the Third Estate and later National Assembly to consider or implement any of Louis’

suggestions led to increased conflict because it in many ways convinced Louis that the

Revolution was his enemy. Between 1789 and 1790, the Assembly took drastic step

regarding the Catholic Church; seizing all church property, eliminating their ability to

collect tithe taxes and eventually, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy that nationalized all

church employees.37 While Louis publicly signed these measures, he vigorously

opposed their enactment. Radical clubs began to appear in Paris and the increasing

atmosphere of uncertainty led Louis to flee the country in an attempt to renegotiate the

terms of the French Revolution.38

Following the king’s failed flight from France and subsequent return to Paris, his

position as monarch held a tenuous balance with the government. Before his attempted

escape, Louis still held an important position within the French government under the

Constitution. He was Chief Executive, able to veto laws and Commander in Chief of

France’s armed forces. Many within the legislature wanted to keep the king as a means

of balancing or dividing power among these branches of government.39 The

Revolutionaries did not want to abolish the monarchy initially; they simply wanted the

king to be the leader or the nation rather than a person above the nation.40 Following

his flight though, his support among both the population and in the government

36 séance royal, in The French Revolution Sourcebook, John Hardman, ed., New

York, Hodder Arnold Publication, 1998. 37 Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 136-140. 38 Jordan, The King’s Trial, pp. 17-20. 39 Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, pp. 112-115. 40 Tackett, When the King Took Flight, pp. 36-37.

31

dwindled severely and left with almost no allies he occupied a precarious political

position.41 In July of 1792, a crowd stormed the Tuileries palace and forced Louis to

wear the red Phrygian cap as a sign of his commitment to the Revolution. Louis had

little choice but to consent and the following image illustrates this awkward juxtaposition.

41 Ibid., pp. 109-110.

32

Figure 2: Louis XVI, King of the French42

In this portrait, Louis XVI appears wearing the Phrygian cap with the Revolutionary

cockade. One of the interesting aspects of this illustration lies in the title that identifies

Louis as the king of the French, rather than the king of France. This title places Louis

within a model of politics where he is member of the nation and an expression of

42 In, Jordan, The King’s Trial.

33

national politics rather than a figure that occupies the center of a hierarchical system

where he is the focus of political life. In this portrait, the king does not represent a

single source of sovereignty, but rather he serves the nation as a member bound by

national law. The symbolic representation of power here has completely turned

because the king no longer competes with the Revolution; he is a servant of the

Revolution. The shift in the location of sovereignty is complete and many in French

society began to ask questions about whether the nation even needs a king to rule.

In her work, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Lynn Hunt

discusses the need to replace the symbols of the nation following the monarchy’s

collapse. She illustrates an important aspect of the profound changes that occurred in

the Eighteenth Century, the ways that the French state and its entire political culture

revolved around the monarchy. In an important section of this book, Hunt discusses at

length how the abolition of the monarchy generated a need to reorient these symbols to

reflect the political realities of the newly declared republic.43 The collapse of the

monarchy in August of 1792, not a month after he donned the liberty cap created a

vacuum of power and representation that needed addressing. The task of reorienting

these symbols would certainly be a difficult one because of the egalitarian, rather than

hierarchical structure of the Revolution’s ideals and its attending symbolic structure.44

As the French Revolution moved from its initial stage and descended into radicalism

following the king’s execution, it was in the context of popular rule. The last decades of

the monarchy and the early phase of the French Revolution built a foundation for

43 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley,

University of California Press, 1982, pp. 52-55 44 Ibid.

34

nationalism that successive governments built on. The centralization of the state, the

growing importance of public opinion and the development of national sentiment all

established the nation as the central political actor in this new era. In the next two

years, this new nation would take up action against its enemies, both foreign and

domestic and emerge far stronger and terrifying than anyone could have imagined just a

few short years before.

35

CHAPTER THREE: HERCULES, LIBERTY AND REPUBLICANS, 1793-1794

I speak of the public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France.1

- Robespierre, Report on Political Morality

During the summer of 1793, The Committee for Public Safety gained near

absolute control over the young French Republic and began a program of political,

social and cultural change that would have a lasting impact well beyond the period of

Revolutionary turmoil. In place of the recently eliminated monarchy, Robespierre and

his associates on the Committee sought to build a new society, based on egalitarian

values, where civic virtue was the highest form of political morality. These new ideals

would recreate French society, shedding the past hierarchy of royalty and nobility in

favor of an enlightened, vigilant citizenry. An important aspect to building this new

society was a program that would replace the symbols of monarchy with a group of new

symbols that reflected the republican concept of the nation. Under Old Regime, the

nation’s symbolic architecture revolved entirely around the monarchy, which occupied

the center of this system of symbolic representation. As the monarchy gave way to the

National Assembly and eventual abolition, representations of the state and the nation

began to shift. Eventually, the elimination of the monarchy and eventual execution of

Louis XVI meant replacing the entire set of symbols at the core of political life with a

1 Robespierre, Report on Political Morality, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Readings in Western Civilization, vol. 7, Keith Michael Baker, ed., Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987

36

new set of symbols that would allegorically represent the nation and reflect the

republican values of equality, liberty and virtue.

In every political society, perception of the leadership’s legitimacy forms an

important cornerstone of state power and the establishment of this legitimacy is often a

complex twist of allegories, symbols, violence and ideology that support the rule of

current state elites.2 Clifford Geertz outlines this process of how different political

societies construct legitimacy, particularly in moments of crisis in his article, “Centers

Kings and Charisma: Symbolics of Power”

At the political center of any complexly organized society (to narrow our focus now to that) there is both a governing elite and a set of symbolic forms expressing the fact that is truth in governing. No matter how democratically the members of the elite are chosen (usually not very) or how deeply divided among themselves they may be (usually much more than outsiders imagine), they justify their existence and order in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances that they have either inherited or, in revolutionary situations, invented.3

Geertz here provides a valuable theoretical framework for examining the vacuum that

existed in France following the King’s execution. The Revolutionary government

needed to invent stories, myths and public rituals to give form and legitimacy to the

infant republic. The different ways that the government employed the established

figures of Hercules and Liberty in new and inventive ways illustrates an important facet

of this process of building legitimacy in this particular, revolutionary situation.

2 Clifford Geertz, Center’s Kings and Charisma: Symbolics of Power,” in Clifford

Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 121-146.

3 Ibid.

37

Building this new republic was certainly an endeavor that required an immense

amount of ambition and it arose largely because of the unique opportunities that existed

following the king’s execution. The once powerful monarchy had fallen and in the void

left in the wake of its demise, France’s new, republican political leaders possessed an

empty sandbox to reformulate the underpinnings of political life. In creating symbols for

the nation, the Committee for Public Safety and their associates faced an array of

problems that largely resulted from the unexpected course of events preceding the

Committee’s seizure of power. In the spring of 1792, nearly no one in French political

society would have expected the collapse of the monarchy, much less the guillotining of

Louis XVI one year later. Yet, despite the lack of expectation, these surprises were the

facts of the day.4 From the dawn of the modern era, the French monarchy occupied the

preeminent position in French political society and this unprecedented collapse

presented such an exceptional opportunity to remake political culture because of the

absence of an established political order. At this moment, the French Revolution

transformed itself from a movement to reform the state into a movement that would

remake the state and the society it ruled. Understanding the ways that the Committee

used classical allegory in this process of political transformation remains central to

understanding the Revolution itself.

Many members of the Committee for Public Safety were aware of the need to

replace the symbolic structures of monarchy because they were still fresh in the nation’s

4 Baker, The Old Regime, p. 333. In Lacroix’s speech, he gives a laundry list of

suggestions on how to deal with the present federalist uprisings. He makes several remarks that indicate even his surprise with the speed that events transpired: “in a revolution as fast as our own.”

38

collective memory and many of them agreed that a need existed to carry out a

concentrated campaign to reorient the symbols of power. Sarah Maza argues that the

new organization of myth and story would prove to be fundamentally different than

before. Representations of the nation shifted from the “royal household writ large” to

an “all male, representative assembly” and that this transformation shifted the basis of

political legitimacy from the iconic to the textual.5 These new realities necessitated a

reasoned, nation centered allegory of state authority to replace the previous image

centered monarchy centered allegory.6 In the political arrangement that preceded the

Revolution, the king, nobility and church stood above the rest of society in an

international hierarchy that connected through family ties across Europe. 7 Republican

Revolutionaries though, particularly those on the Committee of Public Safety were

committed to the idea that the nation was the supreme source of law and state

institution should reflect this fact.8 The allegorical figures Liberty and Hercules

provided useful and accessible symbols of legitimacy because much of their meaning

was connected to abstract values like strength, courage and freedom from bondage

5 Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of

Prerevolutionary France, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp. 313-314. 6 Ibid. 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism, New York, Verso, 2006 (reprint), pp. 12-17. Here, Anderson discusses the cosmology of the West prior to the Age of Revolutions. He describes the international hierarchy of kings and religious communities as “taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is today” and that the public sphere that developed in the late Eighteenth Century replaced these cultural frames of reference. The importance of Anderson’s work here lies in his insistence that printed language was the vehicle of this change because that meant the public sphere in France was limited to those who spoke French, which necessarily excluded Germans, Italians, etc., making the “imagined community” of those in France paramount over all other cultural connections, especially among the emerging bourgeoisies.

8 Ibid.

39

focused on the “imagined” national community. This orientation stood in contrast to the

previous emphasis on specific individuals like the king or bishop because sovereignty

now originated with the nation.9 Employing these allegorical figures as national

symbols also established a new connection for the government to the ancient past that

would help to create a historical basis and legitimacy for the new government, in a

sense, inventing a history for France’s new Republic.10

Immediately following the King’s arrest and declaration of the republic in August

of 1792, the new republican government went about drafting a seal that would visually

embody the values of this new government. The deputes faced several pressing issues

following the monarchy’s fall concerning the design of this new seal because the defeat

of the monarchy brought about an opportunity to reorient national symbols to reflect the

values of the newly declared republic. At the beginning of this process, a seal emerged

that contained the goddess liberty standing, holding a pike with a liberty cap and the

fasces bundle.11 Figure Three represents an early attempt to represent power in a

visual fashion independent from the fallen monarchy.

9 Ibid. 10 Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Invention of Tradition,” in The Invention of Tradition,

Eric J. Hobsbawm, Terrence Ranger, ed., Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 4.

11 Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image,” Representations, 1983, 1(2), 95-117, p. 96

40

Figure 3: Seal of the Republic12

Several important symbols in this seal illustrate an attempt on the part of the new

republican government to establish legitimacy through allegory. First, Liberty holds the

fasces in one hand and a pike with a liberty cap in the other. The seal clearly connects

this authority to the nation, allegorically illustrated by the feminine figure of Liberty. In

the other hand, Liberty holds a pike with a liberty cap on top and this symbol connects

the nation to the Revolution because the Phrygian cap represented freedom from

slavery in the ancient world. In a sense, she becomes the embodiment of the nation

and the placement of these two symbols equates the Revolution, the nation and

legitimate authority as one in the same. The pike and Phrygian cap were long symbols

12 “Seal of the Republic,” in Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and that Radical Image,” p. 96

41

of the Revolution, symbolic of both popular violence and freedom from bondage. They

both evoked powerful emotions because both were ideas fundamental to the Revolution

itself because of the Revolution’s undercurrent of direct violence against the old order in

the name of freedom. Secondly, the use of Liberty, a female entity, overturns the

masculine person of the king representing the state and replaces it with a feminine

allegory for the nation, which further removes the monarchy from political life because

liberty associates the state with an abstract allegory rather than a person. Using the

feminine, passive Liberty also removes any connection between the seal and a

particular political faction, suggesting that the national allegory is above petty politics.

This position would stand in stark contrast to the later manifestations of Hercules

because of his active, participant personality, which contrasts with Liberty’s passivity

and serene nature.13

In the turmoil that followed the execution of Louis XVI, a host of crises beset

France that included a royalist uprising in several provinces, war with much of Europe

and intense political divisions in the capital. Almost immediately, the Committee for

Public Safety began to produce a propaganda campaign that would marshal public

support for their agenda and at the same time, build legitimacy for themselves as

France’s rightful leadership. While the use of Hercules and Liberty existed in symbology

prior to the Revolution, the Committee began to use these two classical figures in new

ways, using them as representations of the entire nation, not simply as values to

emulate. First, the Committee used Hercules as a symbol of strength and popular

action that would bolster public morale during the Terror that engulfed France. After the

13 Hunt, “Hercules and the Image of Radicalism,” p. 96

42

successive crises passed, the imagery of Hercules began to shift in both style and

theme as active poses gave way to more passive presentations. Eventually, Liberty

replaced Hercules entirely, representing a more detached, feminine allegory for the

nation that finds it modern incarnation in the iconic figure Marianne. Together, both

figures constitute an allegorical shift away from the hierarchical values of a monarchy

towards the egalitarian ideals of France’s republicans.

In the midst of the emerging chaos that began in 1793, the National Convention

appointed a Committee for Public safety that acted as the de-facto executive branch

until the multiple crises had passed. The new republican government faced crises and

pressures on nearly every front and engaged in several drastic measures in a fight for

survival. Louis XVI’s execution rallied most of the Continent against France as the

crowned heads of Europe attempted to crush the outrageous Revolutionary government

once and for all. The government also faced royalist uprisings in several of the

provincial areas of the country following the king’s execution (known as the Vendee

revolt) in an act of revulsion against actions of the Parisian republicans. The Committee

needed to rapidly gain pubic support and at the same time, build legitimacy for their

actions that were unprecedented in scope and largely impossible to enact without public

support.

Hercules was among the first symbols of the nation that the Committee decided

on following the king’s execution largely because the desire to generate a sense and

feeling of strength among the populace in light of the multiple crises facing France. In

ancient mythology Hercules was the greatest of all heroes, an archetypal character that

embodied strength and accomplishment, overcoming the seemingly impossible labors,

43

a parallel to the crisis that faced France’s government. His mastery over many types of

monsters, which represented vice or evil, further added to this symbol’s utility for a

nation at war. In addition, Hercules possession of a club, which symbolizes

overwhelming, popular force, also proved valuable in representing a nation undergoing

significant turmoil because it illustrates the ability to solve the crises through the sheer

application of force. In addition to helping the new republican government create

legitimacy for itself in the absence of the monarchy, Hercules would also address

contemporary events in a way that would help the government rally public support.

As the federalist insurrection spread during 1793, the Committee faced the

unenviable task of potentially prosecuting a civil war. Hercules presented a symbol that

would emphasize national unity and commitment to the nation in the face of this

counter-revolutionary/royalist uprising that began to appear throughout much of

France’s provincial countryside.14 The Vendee uprising against the central government

raised the real possibility of the Revolution’s failure and reinstatement of the Old

Regime and the government needed to utilize a symbol like Hercules that would

illustrate the necessity of national unity in the face of the royalist uprisings. 15

Secondly, France found itself at war with almost all of Europe’s great powers, many of

whom were aiding the royalist counter-revolutionaries and Hercules would symbolize

great strength and masculine power in the face of this external crisis.16 Similar to the

14 Ibid. 15 J. David Harden, “Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees,” Past and Present, No. 146,

1995, pp. 66-102, p. 66. Harden deals extensively in this article with the process of replacing the king with other symbols that would represent the nation and help build a national consensus around the Revolution

16 Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image,” p. 102.

44

Vendee Revolt, Hercules establishes an allegory for the revolutionary government to

express the nation in such a way that it establishes enemies of the Revolution as

enemies of the nation. Taken together, the allegory of Hercules as a centerpiece of the

new political center would greatly assist the new government in its efforts to prove its

legitimacy because the symbol associated the republic with strength in the face of

France’s many enemies.

Using Hercules to represent the nation provided the added benefit of being a

symbol of masculine action that could replace another masculine figure, the monarch.

The advantages of this choice are numerous because Hercules would not require a

reorienting of the entire scheme of political and gender power poetics, it would only

serve to perfect an existing figure at the center, not the patriarchal nature of that

figure.17 Lynn Hunt argues that the perception of Louis XVI’s lack of masculinity made

Hercules an excellent choice because of his ability to overcome Louis’ shortcomings.18

The widespread public perception of Louis as a man that lacked the necessary

masculine traits to dominate the country and its people greatly impaired his ability to

rule effectively over the nation. This inability to exert masculine control conflicted with

the widespread perception that the king should be the nation’s Pater Familias.19 In the

17 Hunt, Politics Culture and Class. See also, Joan Landes, Women and the

Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, p. 18-19. Landes also discusses this issue in depth in her work on the symbolics of power and how much of the Revolution’s outcome would marginalize women due to the masculine nature of the Revolution and its symbols, notably Hercules.

18 Ibid. 19 Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1992, pp. 50, 103-104. Repeatedly throughout this book, Hunt makes light of constant circulation of material suggesting impotence on the king’s part and extravagant sexual behavior on the queen’s part.

45

1770’s, the widespread knowledge of Louis XVI sexual dysfunction greatly damaged his

public image. Later when his marriage to Marie Antoinette did not produce an heir for

some years, whispers grew that the king was not fully in control of his household.20

Marie Antoinette’s supposed excesses of the 1780’s and the scandals that surrounded

her lavish spending in the midst of France’s apparent fiscal crisis furthered this image of

Louis as a weak man that could not effectively control his family and therefore could not

effectively control his kingdom.21 Replacing the image of this weak king with the image

of a strong, vigorous hero provided excellent propaganda opportunities for the

Committee, even if many within French society did not understand the mythology of

Hercules, they understood the image of strength and power that he represented in

artistic presentations.

The Committee’s use of Hercules also solved many of the problems associated

with the monarch because of Hercules accomplishment of his labors. This parallel

could easily fit contemporary events and even though Hercules possessed elite origins,

his allegory was easily understood throughout French society. Republicans throughout

France viewed Hercules as the classical answer to the king because of his willingness

to confront great challenges with courage and strength rather than the weak and

cuckolded king that was often too content with compromise and accommodation. 22

Furthermore, using Hercules would have an enormously instructive effect on the

population, illustrating the need for proper action and this would help legitimize the

republic because it associated the government with an active hero that solved

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

46

problems, rather than a passive king that deferred to his wife.23 This imagining of a

hero who solved problems through action stood in contrast to a monarchy that

precipitated the Revolution through the inability to solve any past problems.

The presentation of Hercules as this model of masculine action presented a

model of proper gender roles to the population that affected women for years to come.

Hercules would not only serve as a symbol that united France during the Revolution, his

public persona relegated women to the domestic in the years that followed. Joan

Landes addresses this gender division in her book, Visualizing the Nation through a

discussion about the connections between public symbols and gender realities that

existed: “Increasingly, good governance and good morals were associated with

domesticity; and domesticity came to mean women’s restriction to the domestic sphere

and domestic tasks, in lieu of their full participation in the nation’s public life.”24 Here

Landes explains a particular outcome of the choice to associate a male figure with the

nation because she argues that it created a division between male and female citizens

and their rights to participate in political life. In addition to a masculine gendering of the

public sphere, the use of Hercules illustrated an ideal of action that French men could

emulate and women could not, thereby excluding them from the public sphere.

While the figure of Hercules corresponded to the ongoing effort to replace the

king as the principle symbol of the nation, different representations illustrate the varying

ways that the Committee government was able to take this figure and mold common

representations to fit contemporary events of 1793 in the midst of the federalist crisis.

23 Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image,” p. 102. 24 Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution

in Eighteenth Century France, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 6.

47

Initially, Jacques-Louis David produced a sketch of Hercules [figure 4] that

communicated this symbolic form to members of the National Convention and the

educated classes.25 An important aspect of this work lies in the high literary qualities

this sketch possesses, especially when compared to later Herculean images where the

connections to contemporary politics are much less subtle. In this case, Hercules only

vaguely mirrors contemporary events and retains many classical motifs. Here, David

clearly attempts to connect the overthrow of the monarchy and birth of the new Republic

to one of Hercules’ most famous tasks, the defeat of the Hydra. In the following image,

a nude Hercules stands astride the Hydra as representative of the French people while

at the same time, the Hydra resembles Louis XVI.

25 “Hercules and the Radical Image,” p.107.

48

Figure 4: The French People Overwhelming the Hydra of Federalism26

Framing the Vendee uprisings in terms of the Louis XVI and the Hydra clearly

illustrates the royalist nature of these uprisings because the image illustrates a defeated

Louis lies beneath a triumphant Hercules. The placement of Hercules atop the Hydra

and the manner that he fights, using the club of popular violence, rather than a military

26 Jacques-Louis David, “The French People Overwhelming the Hydra of

Federalism,” in Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution” p. 101.

49

implement sends important messages about the people and their legitimate role in the

Revolution.27 First, the image clearly sends the message that the nation taking

protective action against the monarchy and royalist conspirers and remains willing to

take such action again in the future. In this case, David clearly intends the more

educated members of society as his audience, sending a message to political enemies,

those considering a future conspiracy or uprising about the willingness of the nation to

protect itself. Members of the uneducated, sans-culottes were not intended as

recipients because of their limited exposure to classical mythology. Secondly, Hercules

grasps the fasces, a classical symbol for unity and rightful authority, from Louis XVI

dying hand presents an allegory of a legitimate power transfer to the people. This

aspect of the portrait perhaps more than any other illustrates the government’s attempt

to position themselves as the legitimate representative of the people and the monarchy

and their royalist allies as enemies of the people.28 Thirdly, positioning Hercules atop

the fallen Louis XVI shows the club of popular violence’s effectiveness because the

people, incarnated in Hercules used the club to defeat their royalist enemies and claim

the allegorical position of dominance.

The Committee often utilized Hercules in a position of strength and power to

further its aim of projecting this strength on to the new republic and similar images of

Hercules appear in additional presentations of Committee propaganda. Other

representations of Hercules associate him much more clearly with the sans-culottes

rather than mythological settings. The previous Hercules print is a highly stylized

27 Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation. 28 Ibid.

50

allegory that contains multiple layers of meaning due to its complex symbolic structure.

In other surviving prints of Hercules during this period, artists cast him as the

embodiment of the people and of the republic, wielding the club of popular anger,

vanquishing all of his enemies. While previous image cast Hercules in a more classical

light through its allegorical use of the Hydra and Hercules labors, the following

engraving [Figure 5] takes a more direct approach, showing Hercules directly attacking

a the fallen monarch:

Figure 5: Le Peuple Mangeur de Rois29

29 “Le Peuple Mangeur de Rois,” in Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image,” p.

103. This image also contains striking references to French military victories that began to happen in the spring and summer of 1793, which eased up the external crisis. Yet,

51

In this incarnation, Hercules was directly associated with the popular classes. Unlike

the previous picture, where David presents Hercules in a nude, classical motif, in this

picture, Hercules is dressed like a sans-culotte, ready to defeat all of his enemies. This

presentation of Hercules contains some particularly important symbolic allegories

related to republican government’s legitimacy. First, Hercules is directly associated with

the sans-culottes. In this sense, the Committee is attempting to gain legitimacy through

the presentation of an allegory of the government directly representing this particular

group. Unlike the previous print, the sans-culottes would easily recognize the symbolic

form of this picture because it is a clear and direct attempt to marshal their support for

the government through the association of the government’s actions with their actions.

Secondly, this picture contains a terrifying meaning for the Committee’s foes because of

its illustration of popular violence against the government’s enemies. The Hercules

here is not fighting a mythological battle with the hydra representing the monarchy; he

fights a real battle, acting out violently against an actual caricature of the king once

again using the club of popular violence. To many within French society this

representation of Hercules as a san-culotte, using the club of popular violence against

his enemies must have been terrifying because it illustrates an absolute commitment to

vanquish all enemies. This commitment sent a clear message to the remaining

aristocracy and middling classes that they too would become targets of this violence if

the government perceived them as enemies of the republican cause.

connecting the unity of the people, embodied in Hercules to military victories represented a significant turning point in this line of propaganda because it translated Hercules into literal success, not symbolic success against France’s enemies.

52

While the imagery of Hercules certainly presents compelling clarity of action and

meaning, the Committee (and indeed later governments) only utilized Hercules during

this approximately twelve-month period between the summer of 1793 and 1794. The

year of the Terror and its accompanying anxieties left many within French society

exhausted and fearful of further rounds of uncontrollable violence. Following the

Thermador reaction, the active, violent images of Hercules began to retreat in favor of

the more passive, serene allegory of Liberty. Joan Landes argues that Liberty satisfied

a number of requirements for national representation that Hercules could not fill. Most

notable was a clearer separation between the symbols of the Revolutionary government

and the Old Regime monarchy.30 Most importantly though, the imagery of Liberty

signaled as shift from the specter of swift, masculine, violent state action many

members of society found disagreeable and frightening, towards a more feminine,

passive allegory for the state. The following image [Figure 6] begins to bridge the gap

between the prominence of Hercules to the prominence of Liberty.

30 Joan Landes, “Representing the Body Politic: The Paradox of Gender in the Graphic Politics of the French Revolution,” in Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine ed., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 28-29. see also, Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation.

53

Figure 6: Sketch by Dupree for Hercules Coin, 179531

In this image, an original sketch of the new Republic’s seal, two Liberty figures in

togas, bearing Revolutionary symbols flank Hercules who remains in the center. While

in several previous images, Hercules is an active participant, acting out to defeat the

monarchy and royalist conspiracies, in this sketch, Hercules stands with the dignity of a

Roman patrician, while on either side the Liberty images stand with the nobility of the

31 “Sketch by Dupree for Hercules Coin, 1795,” in, Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture

and Class, p. 114.

54

vestal virgins. The picture clearly attempts to restore a level of civility to the symbolic

allegories of public life that were missing during the Terror. Whereas previous images

of Hercules appealed to the sans-culottes, this image makes no popular appeals, but

rather seeks to restore civil society in the wake of the previous year’s violence. In this

image, Hercules lacks the club of popular anger that was so prominent in previous

illustrations and his serene and calm demeanor give an impression that a national

commitment exists to end the tumult. After the Committee's fall, the Constitution of Year

III divided power among a five man Directory and the image reflects this shared

authority and division of power that the new government instituted.32

In addition removing the images of popular violence associated with the two

previous images, this picture attempts to discuss the emerging gender division brought

about during the previous years.33 The image clearly attempts to illustrate the proper

relationship between the masculine and feminine, restoring what the Revolutionaries

believed to be the natural gender order restoration following the previous years of

chaos. Landes points out the nature of Roman male and female morality: “male virtue

required a certain stoical, public self-exaltation, women’s virtue was tied to chastity and

fidelity within marriage.”34 In a sense, while the previous images of Hercules illustrated

ideal masculine action, the Liberties in this image present the ideal of feminine virtues.

Like Maza’s previous argument, this picture illustrates a formalization of the new public

domain of rational men because of its suggestion that Hercules is leading the two

32 William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, New York, Oxford

University Press, 1989, pp. 318-320. 33 Landes, Visualizing the Nation. 34 Landes, “Representing the Body Politic,” p. 29.

55

women through the placement of his hands and his head that faces straight.35 Here,

Landes articulates the way that the Revolution began to change the political culture

towards a model of abstract virtue rather than the Herculean model of masculine, direct

action.

Following the Directory’s seizure of power, as the foreign and internal threats to

the government passed, the new government enjoyed a confidence and legitimacy that

previous Revolutionary regimes lacked. Together, the Revolution appeared vastly more

secure in 1794 than it had a year earlier and the political symbols reflected this fact.

The decisive action and popular violence allegorically represented by Hercules a year

before nearly disappeared with the Committee government that created him. By 1799,

the year of Bonaparte’s coup, the figure of Liberty came to embody the allegorical

representations of the republic. While seeking to invent legitimacy for themselves

following the king’s execution, the leaders of France’s infant republic turned to Hercules

to gain public support for their radical agenda in the face of multiple crises. Here, the

shift happens from Hercules to Liberty, when the Terror subsided, the French

Revolution remade the allegory representing the nation. The feminine, abstract virtues

of Liberty replaced the masculine action of Hercules and for the next five years, symbols

oriented toward Liberty institutionalized and would wait only for Napoleon, who had an

allegorical agenda of his own that would once again remake the state.

35 Ibid.

56

CHAPTER FOUR: NAPOLEON AND THE NEW ROME

We have finished the romance of the Revolution, we must now begin its history, only seeking for what is real and practicable in the application of its principles, and not what is speculative and hypothetical."1

-Napoleon Bonaparte, Speech following the Coup of 19 Brumaire

Following the Coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon Bonaparte, his brother Joseph and

their allies began assembling a new government that would concentrate power within

Bonaparte’s inner circle, consolidate the gains of the Revolution, as well as reconcile

the many different Counter-Revolutionary factions to this emerging authoritarian state.

Napoleon promoted himself as a national savior and his impressive military resume,

widespread public popularity and his perceived commitment to the Revolution’s ideals

all played key roles in his public persona. When he and his conspirators gained control

of the French state, France was a society awash in classical allegories that the

preceding decade’s governments incorporated into their political platforms. Napoleon

was intimately aware of the ways that various factions used symbolism to gain

legitimacy. He likewise understood the monarchy’s shadow still loomed over French

political life. Because of these two factors, Bonaparte embarked on a plan to rebuild the

allegorical representations of the nation in a fashion that emphasized both his

revolutionary credentials, but also reassured more conservative elements of French

society that the Revolution’s violence and upheaval were at an end.

During the Revolutionary decade that saw the shift from absolute monarchy to

republic, successive governments attempted to build legitimacy through the

1 Napoleon Bonaparte, Speech following the Coup of 19 Brumaire, 1799.

57

employment of various representations and allegories from the classical world. Liberty

and Hercules replaced the monarchy as representatives of the nation in active and

passive fashions, sometimes appearing together and sometimes apart illustrating both

the virtues and actions of the French people. As the decade wore on and one series of

tumultuous events followed another demands grew for an end to the Revolution’s crisis

model of politics. While Napoleon’s decisive victories over Austria delivered the

Directory a great deal of latitude in 1797, the following year brought a string of

humiliating military defeats as well as a constant barrage of royalist conspiracies.

Faced with these crises, Siéyes arranged a coup that would end the uncertainties,

prevent a return to radicalism and install him as a virtual dictator.2 Siéyes was a

Revolutionary survivor if there ever was one. He penned the famous pamphlet, “What

is the Third Estate?,” initially supported the creation of a National Assembly and

survived the Terror. Given his credentials, it appeared to many that he was a natural

choice to lead France into a new era but Siéyes proved unable to control the popular

Bonaparte as he had imagined. Instead, Bonaparte, not Siéyes emerged as dictator

and Napoleon quickly needed to construct an image of himself as an perceived ally of

the Revolution.3 This image would have two important effects, first, it would establish

Napoleon’s rule as a continuation of the Revolutionary process, rather than an

interruption of the Revolution. Secondly, Bonaparte could use the existing symbolic

allegories of the nation and associate them with himself. Bonaparte relied on these two

2 William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, New York, Oxford

University Press, 1989, pp. 370-372. 3 Ibid., pp. 372-375.

58

factors when creating legitimacy for his new government through connections to the

immediate and ancient past

During his rule, Bonaparte took great care to construct legitimacy for his

dictatorship that drew connections to the Revolution and antiquity because of his desire

to avoid accusations that his new government simply represented a return to the

monarchy. Also aware of the public’s desire to avoid a return to Jacobin radicalism,

Bonaparte positioned himself alongside a group of rulers from the ancient world that

brought peace and prosperity following a series of crises. From Pericles, to Julius and

Augustus Caesar, Bonaparte found no shortage of examples to draw on and more

importantly, illustrate parallels between his rule and their mythic tale of success in the

face of social discord and external disorder.4

The Committee for Public Safety may have begun the process of constructing

new symbols of the nation but it would be under the rule of Bonaparte that at the France

reached at least some consensus about the symbolic representation of the nation.5

While scholars focus on the ways that he consolidated the central state, influenced the

artistic style of the day, and changed the map of Europe, few discuss the important role

4 Scholars have produced many fine biographies on Napoleon and they all make

mention of his interest in the ancient world and the ways that he studied historical generals, most prominently, Julius Caesar. Alan Schom and Paul Johnson’s noted biographies paint a devastating picture of a tyrannical opportunist while Bergeron and Palmer’s France Under Napoleon paints a much more sympathetic view of Bonaparte and his motivations. All agree though that his study of historical events coupled with his belief in the inevitability of his destiny led him to fashion himself after these ancient rulers. See, Louis Bergeron, see also, Alan Schom, Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life, New York, Harper Perennial, 1998.

5 Odile Nouvel, Symbols of Power: Napoleon and the Art of the Empire Style, 1800-1815, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2007.

59

he played in consolidating a common national mythology and laying the foundations for

a process of nationalization that would continue throughout the Nineteenth Century.6

Scholars often find Bonaparte’s rule a polarizing subject because while he

institutionalized many reform ideas of the Revolution, failed to institute other reforms,

charted the nation’s law code, he achieved these goals through the vehicle of a military

dictatorship. Military historians herald Bonaparte’s tactical genius, extolling his rule as a

breakthrough era in Western history where strategies he developed persist into the

contemporary era.7 Social historians applaud his emphasis on careers open to talent

because of the ways that Napoleon opened the military promotions to merit. At the

same time, they find Bonaparte’s clear break from the Revolution’s ideals of Equality

and Democracy troubling because he signaled a return to hierarchy and the

authoritarianism.8 Legal historians point to the Code Napoleon as a watershed moment

in the development of the Western legal tradition due to its simplicity, clarity and

universality.9 Even romance novelists have cannibalized the story of Napoleon and

Josephine into dozens of tales about love, betrayal and loss.10 While the historiography

6 Robert Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State

University, 1978, pp., 180-182. see also, Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France, Palo Alto, Stanford University Press, 1976.

7 Many scholars of Napoleon’s military strategy and campaigns reference his admiration and study of Julius Caesar. They neglect though, the ways that he publicly compared himself to this and other Roman rulers to obtain both military and political objectives. See, Albert Sidney Britt, The Wars of Napoleon, West Point, Square One Publishing, 2003.

8 A tremendous amount of contemporary biographical work on Bonaparte focuses on his psychological problems and the ways that they may have affected his actions as ruler.

9 Holtman, pp. 88-90 10 Theo Aronson, Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, New York, St. Martins

Press, 1990.

60

concerning Napoleon generates nearly as much division and emotion as his legacy

within France, when compared to his military or person life, only a small portion deals

with his contributions to the development of national symbols.

Unlike much of the historiography, Robert Holtman’s work, The Napoleonic

Revolution provides a survey of Bonaparte’s domestic and political policies.11 Holtman

discusses the ways that Napoleon accomplished the consolidation of his rule through

the construction of modern governmental institutions. The central theme of Holtman’s

work lies in his examining the various ways that Bonaparte kept certain values of the

Revolution when it suited his policies and how discarded other values of the Revolution

when they got in his way.12 For example, before Napoleon’s rule, almost all of the

Revolutionary governments were committed to representative government and

Bonaparte retained these institutions because they granted him legitimacy, but they

operated in a limited fashion. Holtman further discuses the ways that Bonaparte’s

ability to build state institutions within this legislative framework while essentially

neutering the nation’s avenues of popular participation that were a hallmark of the

Revolution. While Holtman does tremendous work examining the Napoleon’s legacy in

government, his project does not examine the ways that Bonaparte manipulated

symbols, particularly classical symbols that previous governments used, to both build

his own legitimacy as well as manipulate public opinion to support his agenda.13

In many ways, Bonaparte’s emphasis on classical symbols represented a

tremendously expedient solution to the problem of appearing to be both a dictator and

11 Holtman, The Napoleonic Revolution. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

61

ally of the Revolution because many members of French society recognized and

understood classical pictures and myths. Previous governments heavily utilized

classical allegories as a means to build their own legitimacy, especially in the wake of

the monarchy’s collapse and neo-classical style was an entrenched style of the day.

Many members of the Eighteenth Century elite believed that the Classical world

represented a high point of Western Civilization par excellance and much of Ancient,

particularly Roman history is replete with examples of strong military leaders

transforming society from chaos to stability through a program of authoritarian, but

enlightened ruler.14 Often times, Bonaparte fashioned himself a modern version of

Augustus, a strong leader that rescued the public polity from the previous chaos of

Revolution, Civil War, self-interested plots and the elite’s general moral decay. In

Harold Parker’s book, The Cult of Antiquity he describes the almost religious fanaticism

that many members of the Revolutionary generation shared for the Revolution,

Bonaparte’s attempt to use symbols and myths from antiquity drew connections

between himself, his actions, and his circumstances illustrate his invention of history.15

During the Directory period when Napoleon began his rise to power, the ineffectiveness

14 Philip Ayers, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth Century

England, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 86-90. Ayers discusses the ways that the English aristocracy idolized and attempted to replicate what they believed to the virtues of the Roman aristocracy. Similarly, in France, many members of the Enlightened class, which had rose to power in various ways during the Revolution also viewed the aspects of the classical world as exemplary of superior virtue.

15 Harold Parker, The Cult of Antiquity in the French Revolution, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1937. Phillip Dwyer, Napoleon and Europe, New York, Longman, 2001. Like Holtman’s book, Dwyer focuses the grand themes of Napoleon’s rule rather than specific elements. While Dwyer tends to discuss the ways that Bonaparte changed European society, he does discuss domestic politics in France Bonaparte’s insistence on his Revolutionary credentials.

62

of the government, the constant threat of plots and coups led many in French society

fear another round of chaos and violence in the name of idealism.16 Napoleon, through

the auspices of the 18 Brumaire Coup offered an end to these threats, along with a

parable from Rome that would connect him allegorically to the past.

While many history books mark Siéyes coup as the beginning of Bonaparte’s

political power in France, Napoleon still faced obstacles to the consolidation of his rule.

While command of a sizable army that endowed him with a considerable amount of

prestige for their recent defeat of Austria gave Napoleon a wide-ranging amount of

political strength, it was his clever political maneuvering ultimately delivered him

unquestioned rule.17 Following the coup, the French government quickly adopted a

new constitution that would vest most power in a Consulate made up of three officers

called Counsels along with a legislature called the Senate.18 Siéyes believed that he

would lead this new government but quickly found Bonaparte outmaneuvered him on

several occasions.19 This new arrangement of the government would essentially hand

most power to a triumvirate of executives to the exclusion of the legislature because

during the Directory’s rule, the legislature was seen as an ineffective institution filled

with squabblers who lacked the vision and unity of previous Revolutionary governments.

Napoleon immediately took steps to ensure the curtailing of legislative power and

enhancement of the executive branch that would have the effect of legitimacy due to the

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 32 18 Ibid., Bonaparte cleverly named these new organs of government to illicit the

memory of Rome in his rule. 19 Doyle, pp. 370-375.

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early Revolution’s insistence on a national legislative body.20 One of the three

Counsels would retain the title of First Counsel and would hold more power than the

other two because they would be responsible for the day-to-day operations of the state

and while Siéyes believed he would be first Counsel, Bonaparte’s popularity, political

standing and command of the army allowed him to gain the first Counsel title.21 What

makes this change in government so interesting lies in the ways that Napoleon and his

co-conspirators decided to use names and organizational schemes that elicited

memories of a glorious past of the pax romana. This aspect of Bonaparte’s plan

especially appealed to a French citizenry exhausted from a decade of civil unrest and

war who wanted stability.

Before Rome’s Principate that saw the rise of Octavian to political primacy, the

Roman Republic saw decades of political and social upheaval that saw the rise and fall

of such famed names as Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra and ultimately

concluded with a final round of plots, conspiracies and civil wars that left Octavian

victorious and unchallenged. While Napoleon did not explicitly make comparisons

between his seizure of power and Octavian’s, he certainly presented himself to the

French public as a similar figure that would bring order to chaos. Even his subsequent

coronation, which was more a monarchical coronation than an installation possessed a

distinct awareness to the Roman past such as the laurel wreath and Roman style.22

20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 “Caesar the Foe: Roman Conquest and French Resistance in French Popular

Culture”, Giusseppe Pucci, pp. 190-191, in Maria Wyke, ed., Julius Caesar in Western Culture, Malden, MA, Blackwell Press, 2006, pp. 190-243. In this work, Pucci discusses the various ways that Caesar and a particular vision of the past, especially as it related

64

The Structure of French government, three Counsels appeared strikingly familiar to the

Roman republic and Bonaparte because Napoleon encouraged people to compare the

new Consulate government with the Republic of Ancient Rome.23 Like his Roman

counterparts, Bonaparte’s power rested squarely on his notoriety as a military

commander and the presence of his unquestioningly loyal troops added a certain aura

to his political status.24 Napoleon’s ability to wield the army for his own political agenda

helps explain the ways that he was able to shift the focus of national symbols away from

abstract virtues like freedom and equality which previous governments used to bolster

their legitimacy and more directly to himself and his image which he used to legitimate

himself.

In the early years of Napoleon’s rule, an important shift took place in the ways

that the French political system thought about and conceived of legitimacy. Following

the onset of the Revolution, the National Assembly was busy creating a government

that would reflect national will through representative institutions. The ways of

representing the nation shifted as well during this period, away from the single individual

of the king and towards an embodiment of the nation. During the Terror, which followed

the king’s execution, the Committee government rapidly centralized power and

conceptualized itself as the representative of national will.25 Symbols during this period

illustrated terrifying portrayals of the nation striking out against its enemies. As the

to Bonaparte. He notes that Bonaparte’s self comparisons to Caesar were a point of argument for both his supporters and detractors.

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley,

University of California Press, 1982, p. 55.

65

terror subsided, the Directory sought to remove the radical images from national politics

because the radical political climate retreated. As a new round of conspiracies and

uprisings crept into France’s political consciousness, Bonaparte and his conspirators

sought ways to install themselves as a more conservative alternative to the potential for

more radicalism that waited for the right climate.26 Most importantly though, Bonaparte

possessed Revolutionary credentials that allowed him to reorient politics towards

himself without the accusations of counter-revolution because he claimed a desire to

preserve the most valuable elements of the Revolution while eliminating the inherent

instability and uncertainty that Revolution’s bring.27 The Emulation of Roman emperors

allowed Bonaparte to accomplish both of these goals because through building a

fictional connection to Rome he could invent continuity with the past that would serve to

show a positive historical example of his program and would compare him to system

that he believed preserved Rome’s values while expelling Rome’s civil wars.

With the population exhausted from a decade of Revolutionary turmoil,

Bonaparte found it easy to position himself as a national savior and his propaganda

efforts reflect this allegory. To this end, he constantly attempted to remind the public

that he was a leader that would bring about an end to the factions, uprisings and wars.

This idea of Napoleon the guarantor of stability formed the foundation of his early

propaganda efforts. In the following image, Bonaparte rescues the allegorical

representation of France from the abyss of fanaticism and destruction:

26 Holtman pp. 24-25. 27 Ibid.

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Figure 7: Napoleon Saves France28

In this image, Napoleon, dressed in his military uniform helps France, embodied in

feminine form back from the abyss of chaos. In this work, Bonaparte receives

assistance from Liberty, who symbolically clutches the fasces and the appearance of

the fasces and liberty together suggests Bonaparte’s desire to associate himself with

the Revolution. On the other hand, the radical embodiment of the Revolution attempts

to pull the feminine allegory of France into the abyss. This aspect of the work illustrates

a desire on the part of Napoleon to separate himself from the radical, republican phase

28 Lynn Hunt and Jack Censor, “Napoleon Saves France,” Liberty, Equality,

Fraternity [CD-ROM], State College, Pennsylvania State University, 1998.

67

of the Revolution. While this image represents an early attempt to build his political

credentials, Bonaparte later began to associate his rule with the past glories of Rome.

One of the most obvious ways that Bonaparte emulated Roman emperors was

through the commissioning, and production of statues, paintings and busts in public

places that reinforced his popular propaganda as an enlightened leader. Previous

Revolutionary leaders emphasized new national symbols in their construction projects,

but Bonaparte on the other hand emphasized himself and his accomplishments as well

as identifying his images as the embodiment of the “nation.”29 Busts served two very

important functions for Napoleon in his new program of self-promotion; first, they

emphasized the personal nature of his rule and his government. While his

predecessors built statues that emphasized the connections between classical

allegories, the nation and sovereignty, Bonaparte built statues and busts that

emphasized connections between the state, the nation and his persona. Second, and

perhaps most important, commissioning works like these illustrated his understanding of

politics because it sent a signal to many in French society, especially among the

nobility, that the previous experiences of the Revolution, the violence, the uncertainty

and the civil strife were at an end.30 Napoleon’s force of will and his unquestioned

command of the military would shut down any action of the Parisian masses that many

29 Ibid., 55-57. 30 An examination of various engravings and paintings from 1799 to 1801

illustrates the propagandistic value of this program. The engraving of Bonaparte re-sheathing his sword illustrates both the interlude of peace at the turn of the century, but also a signal throughout French society that the instability of the previous decade would be over with the commencement of his rule. The Eagle Consular also illustrates his adept political abilities because of its connections to Roman Caesars and the best virtues of these rulers. Secondly, in a letter to the Counsel of Elders Napoleon refers to himself and his soldiers as “friends of the people,” and “friends of the Republic.”

68

within French society blamed for so many of the previous decade’s horrors. Through

the symbolic act of institutionalizing himself with the state and connecting these

institutions to the Roman past would signal an era of stability and prosperity following

nearly a generation of Revolutionary chaos.

While the previous image positions Napoleon as the savior of the Revolution, the

following images illustrate the ways that Bonaparte attempted to build connections with

Roman Emperors and the political stability that this connection represented. Napoleon

commissioned this sculpture to commemorate his coronation as Emperor and the

introduction of his law code into French society. A quick examination of the Bust of

Napoleon (pictured first) and comparison to a Bust of Julius Caesar (pictured second)

yields striking similarities:

69

Figure 8: Bust of Napoleon the Lawgiver31

31 Bust of Napoleon located at www.napoleon.org. This site has many excellent

image galleries, articles and resources dedicated to the study of Napoleon’s career. The site is a collaboration between the Sorbonne and Louvre.

70

Figure 9: Bust of Julius Caesar32

The thematic and physical similarities between these two busts illustrate Bonaparte’s

attempts to Romanize his own image and link this to a leader from antiquity that brought

32 Bust of Caesar located at www.athena.cornell.edu Cornell’s collection of

classical sources in the form of an online archive.

71

about great victories in the name of Rome.33 For example, in this bust, Bonaparte

sports a Caesar style haircut, close cropped on the sides and short bangs. In these

busts, not only are their hairstyles similar, but their facial expressions and general

demeanor show similarities as well. Other portraits of Napoleon from the era do not

present him in such a fashion, choosing to highlight longer hair that was the style of the

day. While Bonaparte wears a Caesar style in the bust, it is also of great significance

that he does not wear the liberty cap, distancing himself from the Revolution’s horrors.

Holtman’s book, The Napoleonic Revolution, ultimately argues that reconciling elements

of the old elite, particularly the nobility, and various Revolutionary factions to his

government was his lasting legacy for France, embodied in the Code Napoleon.34

Bonaparte’s presentation of himself as a ruler that did not desire the establishment of a

monarchy in his name, nor return to republic idealism allowed him to consolidate rule by

appealing to all factions. The allegorical representations of a Roman Emperor highlight

this aspect of his ambition to appear as a moderate.

Like many of his ancient Roman and contemporary European counterparts,

Bonaparte embarked on a concerted effort to place images of his likeness into the

public consciousness throughout French society and the use of common government

instruments like coins and stamps. Throughout history, political leaders, particularly

kings and emperors have placed their images on coins because visibility equates into

33 These two busts, the first commissioned by Bonaparte, called “Bonaparte the

Legislator,” was finished in 1805. The other bust, a widely anthologized Julius Caesar bear striking similarities in both style and substance.

34 Holtman, p. 195.

72

power and legitimacy.35 While the use of stamps, coins and government seals as a

platform to engage public consciousness about the virtues of a particular set of

governing elite is not new, nor unprecedented, the ways that Bonaparte used classical,

especially Roman motifs throughout this campaign is peculiarly interesting. Similar to

the previous busts, Bonaparte placed images of himself in the public consciousness to

associate his person with the state and the nation rather than the allegorical

representations of sovereignty of previous Revolutionary governments. The following

coin illustrates Bonaparte’s efforts to use classical imagery to associate himself with a

Roman leader:

35 " O. Hekster and R. Fowler “Imagining Kings: From Persia to Rome," in O.

Hekster, R. Fowler, Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005, pp. 9-38. In this article, Hekster and Fowler discuss the various ways that monarchs have used similar motifs throughout history to place their images and therefore their authority in the minds of the people they rule. What is interesting in this case lies in the ways that Bonaparte deliberately chooses to mimic a past Emperor as a means to illustrate the continuity of his rule with that of the past.

73

Figure 10: 5 Franc Coin 180436

This coin, dated to 1804, presents Napoleon as First Counsel and the Roman motif

extends beyond this leadership title.37 In this instance, Napoleon wears an olive leaf

garland, symbolic in the ancient world of both victory and peace. The reverse of

Napoleon’s coin also contains the olive leaf garland that in the contemporary era has

come to be recognized and associated with the United Nations and the Olympic games

but in the early Nineteenth Century would mostly be associated with Bonaparte’s

victories over the other powers of Europe and the expansion of French power. Like the

earlier bust of Napoleon, this coin shows him with a Caesar style haircut that by 1811

had become a prominent style of the day.

While Bonaparte’s authoritarian regime oppressed many within French society,

he remained quite popular with the populace throughout much of his rule. Nearly every

36 This 5 Franc coin was issued to commemorate Bonaparte’s five years of

service as First Counsel. 37 In both cases, the coins illustrate the ways that these public figures placed

their image in popular consciousness. Both images are photographs of authenticated coins.

74

scholar acknowledges that he and his allies often rigged his plebiscites even though his

victories were virtually assured without his frequent meddling. What remains though are

the various ways that he attempted to connect his personal popularity with allegorical

representations of the nation. While earlier Revolutionary governments embodied the

nation in allegories of Liberty and Hercules, Bonaparte attempted to embody the nation

in his person. The monarchy associated the central state with the king and Louis XVI

stood above the nation; he was not a member of it. Napoleon similarly attempted to

associate the state with himself and his efforts were on behalf of the nation; Bonaparte

was the embodiment of national will, not personal will. Napoleon at once attempted to

build a modern, uniform government throughout France that instituted many of the

Revolution’s gains, left out others and consolidated national allegories, but also

instituted the West’s first military dictatorship. His frequent references and connections

to classical virtues reinforced this idea during Bonaparte’s rule. Perhaps his most

valuable contribution lay in the combining of the classical allegory of the Revolution with

a politically stable bureaucracy, grounding French society in a set of values that

persisted long into the future despite the return of monarchs, emperors and other

republicans who would all fail to return France to the pre-Revolutionary period.

75

CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION

After Napoleon’s fall, the victorious powers of Europe restored the Bourbon

monarchy in France and the new Restoration government immediately set about

undoing many of the Revolution’s changes. This change would prove difficult though

because the French Revolution’s changes not only replaced the monarchical institutions

of the Old Regime with national institutions, it also replaced the ways that governments

established legitimacy because the nation now occupied a central place in political life.

When Louis XVII took the throne with a high level of popularity, he quickly saw that

popularity disappear when he attempted to overturn many of the Revolution’s changes.

This resistance to his attempts to change the political order was largely due to the

change in the location of sovereignty that the Revolution brought about. Under the Old

Regime, sovereignty rested in the body of the king, but this gradually gave way to the

nation in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century. During the Revolution’s early phase,

the monarchy and National assembly attempted to reach some accommodation about

the visual representations of the nation. The king’s flight and subsequent execution led

to attempts by the Committee government to build an entirely new symbolic architecture

that would allegorically represent the nation without the presence of a king. The decade

of upheaval and violence culminated in the rule of Napoleon who institutionalized many

of the Revolution’s symbols as well as adding his own.

Throughout the 1790’s and the reign of Napoleon, these different governments

attempted to represent this shift through the allegorical representation of the nation’s

role in politics. In many ways, the French Revolution reflects the larger changes

76

happening in Western society about the role that the nation should play in political life.

The Tennis Court Oath chronicled the formation of the National Assembly and

highlighted popular participation of delegates from the Third Estate. Following the

king’s execution, the Committee government used Hercules to project a powerful,

terrifying allegory for the nation protecting itself against its foreign and domestic

enemies. Following the Terror’s collapse, the new Directory once again shifted the

national allegory away from Hercules towards a more serene vision of Liberty,

effectively sending a message that the violence was at an end. Napoleon shifted the

focus of national representation towards images of himself as an individual that

represented the nation and he symbolically represented this fact in the ways he

positioned himself as a Roman Emperor. In each of these instances, the nation

occupies the center of political life and this shift from monarch to nation forms the basis

of the modern nation-state.

The French Revolution and rule of Napoleon saw more than a Revolution in

society and political institutions; it made popular sovereignty a cornerstone of Western

political life. Conceptions of legitimate rule shifted away from hierarchical connections

between man and God, towards a national community choosing leaders to execute their

will on their behalf. In this process, successive Revolutionary governments effectively

resorted to inventing national allegories and connections to an imagined past where

public virtue and reason were the dominant values. These connections to antiquity

resulted from, in part, an attempt to establish the government as the embodiment of

national will and these allegories clearly illustrated a vision separate from the monarchy.

As these allegories representing the nation replaced the monarchy, the need existed to

77

transform the nation into a historical entity that needed connections to the ancient past

in order to demonstrate its continuity, rather than its recent incarnation.

Throughout the Revolution, this process of representing the nation and the

construction of national allegory changed at different points to accommodate a

particular situation. Towards the end of the Old Regime and during the early, moderate

phase of the Revolution, the concepts of king and nation wrapped around each other

and the image of the king still dominated much of national representation. These

concepts began to unravel though as the National Assembly moved forward with its

many reforms and the king began to appear less like the incarnation of the nation, but

rather its enemy. Following Louis XVI’s flight, the monarchy collapsed and the

subsequent declaration of the First Republic forced the new government to look at other

ways of Representing the Nation. In this case, Liberty, Hercules and later Liberty again

represented the nation and the government intended these allegories to shift public

focus away from the individual of the king towards the abstract. The new infant republic

needed to project strength and virtue to the public and these allegories met that need.

In this case, the crises of 1793-1794 necessitated a particular representation of the

nation to fit the circumstance. During the reign of Napoleon, a new set of national

allegories arose to assure a weary and exhausted population that the decade of

upheaval was behind them to be replaced with a new era of peace and prosperity. On

each occasion of symbolic representation, the government chose allegories that would

help them further some political agenda, whether it was putting down royalist uprisings

or the implementation of a new law code.

78

The intellectual changes that the Enlightenment brought about heavily impacted

many members of the Revolutionary generation and the Enlightenment’s belief in many

of antiquity’s virtues made this choice of symbols a natural fit for the Revolutionaries. In

this ironic twist though, the French Revolution took the cosmopolitan beliefs of the

Enlightenment and used them to institute a new system of nationalism that would

destroy any visions of transnational virtues. Liberty would no longer serve as a symbol

of freedom for all, she would become a representation of a particular state and this

important change illustrates the ways that the Revolutionary governments changed

political culture. Under the politics of the Old Regime, loyalty to the king the privileges

of social orders were of paramount political importance. During the Revolution though,

as the shift took place towards popular sovereignty, loyalty to the nation became the

highest political virtue and the symbols of antiquity that represented the nation drew

lines in representation along national lines. The Congress of Vienna found great

difficulty implementing many of their goals because the emphasis on the nation had

spread far beyond France and the national consciousness of many European states

necessitated the Congress focus on the establishment of national borders, rather than a

return to the previous international arrangement.

While the French Revolution changed the location of sovereignty from the king’s

body to the nation, and this thesis examines the different visual manifestations of that

shift, the true importance of this change lies in the ways that this process in France

influenced the subsequent world. Nationalists that believed in popular sovereignty led

the Unification efforts in both Italy and Germany. The United States fought a Civil war

that would determine whether the country was truly a nation or a simple collection of

79

autonomous states. European colonialism in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century

created administrative units among different groups that Europeans considered

“nations” by their definitions. Following World War II, the decolonization of Africa and

Asia led many new leaders there to invent shared national histories in order to legitimize

the new central government. The different representations of the nation at the center of

political life created a system that effectively changed the ways that different

governments thought about the nature of their state. Autocratic increasingly needs

justification in the name of a nation asking “who stands for us?

80

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